Fellow traveler Judith (aka Judith Butler) also announces she no longer wants to be my friend! She doesn’t hold back either in what she says, less of an Australian broom handle up my backside kind of experience, the words she used were more direct and far reaching.
“What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love…
… produced and reproduced at a cultural level. And it is overcome, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence.” (Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. Columbia Univ Press 2000, P78).
The loosen-up scandal she had in mind seemed to me at first to be similar to that done by a large planet named Melancholia colliding with earth, along the lines of the Von Trier film of that name, the scandal of total destructiveness. But I quickly began to have an even worse feeling that Judith was shoving her words further up, as it were, both reversing and bringing to cultural life a new kind of meaning, one which was also being repeated over and over.
So that I was of course forced to cry out in tears!
It happened apparently by chance, as it so often does with melancholic coincidences, that today I was in Bridport attending an event in the town’s Literary Festival titled, ‘W G Sebald 1944-2001 A Celebration’. After some of Sebald's poems were read out by Cheryl Campbell from the new translation done by Iain Galbraith (Across the Land and Water, Selected Poems, 1964-2001), Anthea Bell began to speak of her experience in 1999 working with Sebald on Austerlitz simultaneously translating his German into English; “Which Max was writing at the time all the way through”, she said.
I am not sure this is any good, he modestly wrote on several occasions in the letters she regularly received from him along with the latest drafts; “We had discussions which went on for a very long time. He always wrote in his beautiful handwriting, and I typed”, she said. “Because we would always take a close interest in each other’s writings”, she said.
The road traffic accident in which Sebald died took place two months after the simultaneous publications of the German and English versions of Austerlitz in 2001.
“I was on my own and I felt very sad”, she said as she later undertook the translation of some of his essays for the book titled Campo Santo in 2005. The collection includes the essay called ‘Constructs of Mourning’, an extended exploration by way of Dürer’s Melancholia, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and other ‘inhospitable regions’ where Melancholia is also known to reside.